The University of Guelph earned top honours over the weekend at the North American Intercollegiate Dairy Challenge in Fort Wayne, Indiana, US.
The team consisted of their three coaches Dr. John Walton, Mark Carson and Dr. Ken Leslie with students John Wynands, Peter Spruit, Alan Nanne and Hans van Lith. The UofG team beat out rivals from schools including Cornell, Pennsylvania University and California Polytechnic State University, making this win their fourth over the past nine years!
The University of Guelph is one of the only schools to offer a credited course to prepare students for the Dairy Challenge. Throughout the course, the class visits various dairies and learns how to analyze reports from the operation’s management programs, feed analysis, herd health reports, etc in an effort to determine ways the dairy operation can make changes to become more efficient and therefore more profitable. They are then to prepare a presentation based on their findings, the top four students are the ones chosen for the big competition, which this year was held in Fort Wayne.
The Canadian team faces other challenges as well that most of the other competitors do not. Coming in and analyzing a U.S. dairy without the experience and knowledge of the U.S. Dairy industry can be a hurdle, one of the biggest obstacles being the fact that these dairies are not on a supply management system which the UofG students are used to. The biggest dairy they visited during their course work was a 250 cow dairy , but the dairy they had to analyze for the Big Challenge was 1,000 cows. Although the numbers change and the industry has it’s differences, the principles they’ve learned in the course stays the same. Not letting the size of the challenge overwhelm them, they were able to come out on top!